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T-Mobile Sidekick 4G Review

2011-04-19
what's up everyone John Redmond you're from TechnoBuffalo here you guys know that I've got a penchant for talking I'm gonna try and give you a review of the sidekick 4G for t-mobile in under seven minutes let's go ahead and get started give you a real quick refresher of the specs it's got a 3.5 inch capacitive touchscreen the resolution of 480 by 1800 weighs five point seven ounces being powered by Android 2.2 it's got pretty cool slide-out QWERTY keyboard it's got Samsung's cortex eight Humminbird processor same processor that's powering the galaxy s lines of phones and it's got a Samsung processor cuz it's built by Samsung on the back it's got a three megapixel camera on the front it's got a VGA camera for video call alright so let's go ahead and jump right in with reception this phone does quite a bit but not gonna make good phone call it's not gonna be of much use to you in my xx call tests around various areas of Southern California where I'm at I experienced almost perfect so the first one I've had perfect reception on not one dropped call not a pop call quarter is absolutely fantastic people couldn't tell if I was on a cell phone or a landline the transition from 4G to 3G was not a problem at all and surprisingly for your speakerphone fans the speakerphone works quite loudly on this guy so that won't be a problem for you alright so let's go ahead and talk about the design because it is sort of interesting design if you've ever seen a previous generation sidekick this maintains that form and fuel meaning you've got four buttons on the corners phone is a bit awkward to hold up to your ear because it is a little bit on the thicker side it's not a thick foam but the design feels a little bit strange being held up to your head and it took me about two days to get used to it'll probably take you just around the same so the four buttons here actually found to be extremely annoying using many Android device in the past where the buttons are lined up across the bottom that's what I was used to I thought that I would get used to this after four or five days and I never did so you have your typical sidekick buttons or there's typical Android buttons you've got your menu your back and your home so you're gonna have to navigate where those are you also have a new jump button we'll talk about in just a minute the button RA continues to annoy with the power and lock button on the bottom right hand side of the phone oftentimes you don't know where it is if you've got the alignment to the side sort of hard to tell which way you're holding that phone which way you're looking at it all the times I pull out of my pocket I'm trying to slide the screen up backwards or looking for a lock button and it just wasn't there I would have liked it definitely on one of the ends either the top or the bottom depending on how you hare holding the phone something to keep in mind if something that I got used to eventually but it really did become a no mance to me so this jump key that we talked about is sort of keeping up with the sidekicks social media and messaging features of the phone all it allows you to do is open up shortcut so if I were to slide is open and I hit the jump button and it shows you what you can do here by it the jump button held down a I'd go right into contacts you can set all kinds of different shortcuts here for that jump key it is a nice feature and something that actually comes up to play in the lock screen as well when you unlock the device if you slide it down you get access to your jump menu settings so out one more time no you get access to your jump menu settings actually slide it up fly it the other way you'll go right into the phone itself kind of interesting alright so let's go ahead and continue the sliding mechanism on the sidekick we don't have to swivel out that we've seen on previous generations what we've got is a slide out and it's a pretty cool mechanism that works very very well I wasn't worried about build quality I did this thing about 20 30 times in a row continue to feel solid I didn't have any sort of dinging noise in the spring or any sort of looseness that came up when the screen does pop up were Dill's a keyboard which is hands down the best keyboard I have ever tested on any mobile phone any phone that's come out in the past probably about two and a half years I've reviewed about 80% of them and this is hands down the best keyboard the keys are spaced nicely at they're spaced evenly they've got a great tactile feel to them if you are a heavy email or texture and keyboard as a paramount importance to you you are going to be hard-pressed to find any keyboard physical or on-screen that is going to be better than the sidekick for geez is absolutely amazing the screen resolution here was kinda blah 480 by 800 screenings look a little bit washed out but it was okay looking for a beautiful vibrant screen the sidekick 4G is not going to be for you speed it was relatively fast does have the cortex a8 processor in there it is single core but it's a very capable processor something that we've seen power like Galaxy has series of devices so I'm not going to go into too much detail this one can handle multitasking can handle HD video without any problem on the 4G network I got pretty fast beats them depend on where you are I got about three point five megapixels down or three point five megabits per second rather down this is by no means a slow phone you're getting some high-end features and sort of a lower end s package so you're getting that cortex a8 hummingbird processor which is quite nice but you're sacrificing on the camera department it takes average pictures at best a through megapixel sensor you're not gonna want to use this to become Ansel Adams there are some OS tweaks as well to the Android operating system to sort of make this sidekick s let me go ahead and show you what those are first you got the three buttons right here you can jump right into apps you can see there are some quick messaging features a lot of what makes this a sidekick was actually found in the widgets let me jump right in and show you some of these and these are really nice features I'd like to see make its way to other Samsung build Android devices so we've got things the standard once you've seen group texting here's a really nice feature lets you text directly to groups and one of the other features that I really liked actually it's something called sticky message if you ever receive the text with directions in it or a recipe you know I have to keep referencing back to messages you can actually sticky that right to your home screen really a very nice feature the home screen you've got options for to move to move the screens around if you'd like you've got your typical array of Android screens here and the response was actually pretty good battery life was very nice on this device as well be able to get through a full day even with live wallpapers overall this phone definitely is a worthy worthy phone to be in your pocket if messaging and email is important to you if you're looking for an absolute powerhouse the dual-core and the latest and greatest specs this is not gonna be the one for you if you just want a phone that's gonna work this one is the way to go I'm John Rhett enjoy from TechnoBuffalo and this is at 6 minutes and 49 seconds I'll see you the next video goodbye
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